The Jade Rabbit & the Lady on the Moon

If you look up at the full moon and squint slightly at the markings, you may see the outline of a rabbit. My mother would say it is the Jade Rabbit pounding an elixir of medicinal herbs with his pestle and mortar alongside Chang-e, the Lady on the Moon (also known as Hang-Nga in Vietnam). I can imagine my mother may have heard this story from my grandfather, who sold traditional Chinese medicinal herbs in a small north Vietnamese town before my family had to flee to the south of Vietnam as refugees during the war. He died before I was born, so I never got to meet him, which makes a folktale about traditional Chinese medicinal herbs all the more potent for me. It evokes a wonder about my ancestral past, and adds a magical element to the narrative in my mind about him, and his role as a herbal healer in traditional rural Vietnamese folk life.

In Massachusetts where I live you can witness a remarkable synchronicity in the colors of this Chinese/Vietnamese folk festival, and the colors of fall. The crimson maple leaves that are just beginning to show, the bright yellow late-blooming goldenrod flowers and the red native cranberries that are just ripening, along with the golden corn, and rich brown hues of dying leaves that usher in the fall are just like the vibrant reds and golds that are considered colors of luck, happiness, and joy during this autumn festival in China and Vietnam, and the rich brown color of traditional mooncakes eaten on this special day just adds to the similarity. Here in this photo is a handcrafted linocut print of the Jade Rabbit on the moon, including traditional Chinese medicinal flowers and herbs decorated with maple and oak leaves, fresh cranberries, late-blooming goldenrod flowers, acorns and Chinese Mooncakes!

There are many iterations of this ancient beloved folktale of the Jade Rabbit and how he came to be on the moon with Chang-e, and this particular one is my favorite:

Jade Rabbit came to be the highly skilled medicine-keeper and master crafter of the elixir of immortality on the moon. He had been rewarded this honorable role by the Jade Emperor who had come down to earth from the heavens disguised as a beggar in search of a worthy being for this role. As he roamed the cities in rags, he could not find a single person who would offer him food, so he went into the wilderness and cried out for help. Three wild animals came to his assistance; the monkey, the fox, and the rabbit.

The monkey returned laden with fruits he had gathered from up in the trees. The fox returned with some fish he had caught in a nearby stream. Despite searching throughout the forest, the rabbit could not find any food for the old man from the woodland floor but realized that he could sacrifice himself so that the man could eat, so he threw himself into the fire in an ultimate act of selflessness. At that instant the beggar turned back into the Jade Emperor and caught the rabbit before he fell into the fire. With this selfless act of sacrifice, the Jade Emperor realized the rabbit was the deserving creature who would be entrusted to carry out the noble job of creating the elixir of immortality. With delight, the Jade Emperor carried the rabbit up to the moon, made the rabbit’s fur a dazzling white like jade which is why he is known today as the Jade Rabbit.

Ancient Chinese mythological tales tell us that the mineral jade symbolizes purity and moral integrity, even indestructibility. The most highly-prized jade in China is white nephrite jade, and is found in shades from translucent white to light yellow (just like the moon). Jade is believed to have magical, mystical or immortal powers and is the link between the realms of physicality and spirituality, possessing the qualities of both yin and yang, day and night. Emperors of the past would drink a mixture of pounded jade and herbs in an attempt to become immortal and it was this particular mixture that the Jade Rabbit was entrusted with concocting on the moon.

The folktale continues, and time passes. There comes an age when there are ten scorching suns in the sky that dry up the earth, killing the crops and everyone is at risk of starving. Houyi, a handsome strong archer, raises his bow to the heavens and shoots down nine of the ten suns and as a reward for his heroic deeds, the Jade Emperor’s wife Goddess Xiwangmu (also known as Jin Mu, or “Golden Mother” or the Queen Mother of the West), gives Houyi a small vial of the elixir of immortality, a prize from the Jade Rabbit typically reserved for mortals who have achieved enlightenment.

While Houyi is grateful for the gift, he feels conflicted. He is betrothed to Chang-e, his lover, but Xiwangmu only gave him enough elixir for one person. Houyi does not wish to be immortal if Chang-e cannot also live at his side for eternity, so he stores the vial of elixir under his bed and does not consume it. However, the next day while Houyi goes hunting, his apprentice Fengmeng brakes into his house and tries to force Chang'e to give the elixir to him. To protect the elixir from theft, Chang-e takes the elixir and flies upward past the heavens, choosing the Moon as a refuge, even though she ultimately knows that upon reaching the moon she will become immortal and never be able to return to earth again. As she ascends, Houyi returns home only to discover the elixir and Chang-e are missing. Assuming Chang-e stole the elixir, he raises his bow to strike her down but is intercepted by the Jade Rabbit who had been watching this whole drama unfold from his residence on the moon.

The Jade Rabbit encourages Houyi not to shoot Chang-e and agrees to open the gates to the moon for Houyi and Chang-e to reunite there provided that Houyi agrees to peacefully reconcile. But Houyi hesitates, a shadow of doubt crossing his mind, unsure whether Chang-e had taken the elixir with her as a selfless sacrifice, or whether she purposely stole it to keep it from him so she could achieve immortality for herself.

In the end he choses not to reunite with Chang-e but to return to earth. As a result of his fateful choice, for the remainder of his life he is estranged from his lover, as he remains mortal while she lives as an immortal being, alone on the moon with the Jade Rabbit. In some versions of the story he eventually forgives Chang-e from the crime he imagined she committed and builds himself a shelter on the sun where he calculates the revolutions of the moon, and maps out the planetary orbits so he might be near his lover once a year when the sun and moon are closest in their cyclical paths.

I am particularly enthralled with Jennifer S. Cheng’s narration of this folktale in her book Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems. She describes in beautiful fragmented lyrical prose the moonscape on which Chang-e resides consisting of “white quartz rocks” covered in “incandescent ash of a thousand-year-old dead” where “stones layer like waves” alongside a “winter lake” underneath a sky full of “tepid bone gray clouds”. The Lady on the Moon is “ghostly white” with “chalky fingers” and “bone coldness emanating from her body”. On the moon Chang-e suffers and feels, “the loneliness of an emigrant”, “a stranger in the country surrounding her”. There is an ethereal quality to Chang-e in this moonscape that contrasts with the earthiness, and the mortal nature of earthy beings from which she fled.

There are many iterations of this folktale: perhaps Chang-e was a jealous lover living in the shadow of her heroic husband and and wanted to escape her marriage; perhaps her intents were for the greater good and she wanted to save the elixir from getting into the hands of a thief; other iterations say that she had always used the moon as a place of solace and refuge even withdrawing there during her relationship with Houyi and it was Houyi who was infuriated about her choice of eternal solitude over a mortal life with him.

These various versions of the same folktale are not indications that the story was badly remembered or recorded, or that there is a lack of discernment as to which is the authentic story. On the contrary, the iterations exemplify the essence of folktale and the power of folkloric tradition. Cheng describes it well using the metaphor of a second-hand garment:

“To dress in the intimacy of second-hand clothing: to wear something, like a sweater, that has been stretched by the warmth of another’s frame: to know that each loose patch, each gathered seam, holds the ghostly imprint of another’s movements: a bodily knowledge: a layering of echoes: to take an object historically defined and set its borders in motion” (p. 8 from the Prelude: Sequesterings).

Myths and folktales are inherently maleable like this, they contain remnants of previous narrations, while at the same time taking on the shape of the current telling, always embodying a combination of the two. With a poetic curiosity Cheng puts it brilliantly, “Things disintegrating even as they take on mass. We are, if anything, in tension”. There is certainly a breathing tension felt in the a telling of a folktale, and the skill of the storyteller rests in playing with that tension, to know what to emphasize and what to minimize to enable the story to have the same power over the listener or reader today as it did in the ancient past despite the different contexts. Cheng writes, “Sometimes it helps to say it through a seashell. The sound of it washed in waves, loud yet silent, trailing in and out”. It is in that liminal place in between what gets put in and what gets left out where the magic of folktale happens.

Myths are only as potent as they can be made relevant and meaningful for those currently engaging in them. In this way, it is less important that we know the exact authentic version and more interesting to see how it connects us to our own current issues and life-circumstances. For instance, some iterations of the myth reflect the Confucian gender-bias of past tellers that render Cheng-e voiceless and powerless in the face of male cruelty and deceit. The story, after all, is not told from Cheng-e’s point of view, but from Houyi’s. Cheng attempts to infuse Cheng-e’s voice back into the narrative, she says, “Perhaps I wanted to un-know a myth. We intuited the holes, we knew they were there, we only meant to locate them”. She talks about the complexity of retrieving Chang-e’s voice as a kind of cloudiness as well as a moment of expanding, “like a dark tea as it is beginning to steep”. So much time has passed and so many iterations have been told, it is as though Chang-e’s voice is “in the vapor”, and actual events are more like “condensations”. The retrieval of the female voice and power in this folktale is in the “damp pause between inhalation and exhalation. When nothing is happening but everything. The in-between that no one tells”. Chang-e’s voice, here, is as ethereal as the moonscape on which Chang-e resides.

Ultimately, this folktale tells the story about Truth, how it is always evasive to us as mortal beings. Houyi will never know if Chang-e stole the elixir, or if she sacrificed herself to protect it. To him not knowing makes him doubt, he wants the Truth to be clear cut, black and white, but this belief creates a separation between the two lovers through space and time, a distance that only grows as time unfolds. Truth becomes ever more elusive as more iterations of stories are told.

I often fall into the trap of being like Houyi. Over the years I have asked different family members questions about my grandfather, the medicine keeper, the healer, in hopes of obtaining a clear picture of him. However, all I get are conflicting accounts, some of which portray him as the dominating Catholic patriarch of the family under which my grandmother suffered immensely raising her 12 children during a war. My mother often recalls a time in her childhood when there was widespread starvation, it was 1944 and due to an interplay between French Colonial rule, Japanese military occupation and American military bombings, where between 400,000 and 2 million Vietnamese people died of starvation in the North. My mother’s family of fourteen had to survive on one egg a meal, and some say it was my grandfather who received the entire yolk of the egg while the rest of the family divided the white. Yet at the same time, my mother says it was my grandfather who supported and encouraged her, saw her potential in the midst of a war when her own mother was exhausted and unable to offer the kind of mothering she really needed. Other relatives depict him as revolutionary, a rebel who stood up against Communist propaganda, a hero willing to sacrifice his own social standing and reputation for the pursuit of freedom.

My inclination is to seek for only one consistent truth about my grandfather, but this only distances me from those who have offered their time to tell me their different versions of my grandfather. Perhaps I, like Houyi, with my hesitation to be at peace with the absence of knowing, will always be circling the moon reaching to see it yet it will always remain out of reach. My awareness is only and only ever will be partial as long as I remain mortal.

In the end, this folktale reminds me that it is the Jade Rabbit who is the omniscient one who sees the whole. Perhaps the Jade Emperor made his choice in order for us to let go of our assumptions that we, humans, are the superior creature on this planet, that we can know it all. All too often we celebrate human heroes who win over nature, we pat ourselves on the back when we are able to master and tame the wild, we also claim to know all there is to know about the past. Yet here in this ancient folktale we have a non-human, male peace-maker, a caring self-sacrificer, a story that turns all of this upside down. In this folktale, it is a rabbit who is the keeper of medicines, who had been entrusted for this precious job, who is the omniscient one who sees the whole picture, who encourages Houyi to reconcile with Chang-e regardless of the different iterations of the story Houyi imagines. Perhaps it is a Jade Rabbit, in my imagination, who has convinced me to make peace with the conflicting versions of my grandfather as well.

I see the central values embodied in this folktale represented in the Yin Yang symbol, the two black and white circles emblematic of the moon and sun, like the two lovers, never touching yet somehow part of each other and how a combination of opposites, completes the whole. Perhaps all along I was given the whole picture of my grandfather: a complex human with good and bad sides like all humans, fraught with all the normal human desires and imperfections as well as strengths and gifts. In Cheng’s version it is also the Lady on the Moon who embodies these contrasting qualities. She says, “A woman is a lady is a goddess is a virgin is a child. Or she is a shadow, a temptress, a hindrance, a fool. Instead: An unsettling distance, unmoored. She flew to the light of the moon.” This folktale tells us that contradictions are the very nature of truth and this one reminds me all the more important it is to cultivate a capacity for nuance and duality and master the art of living with opposing truths when confronted by stories of my ancestral past.

Today of course, we have not heard of anyone achieving immortality, yet traditional Chinese medicines are highly prized ways to increase longevity, lengthen life, heal from ailments. I grow to know them more as I age, using dong quai and ginger for my migraines, along with kudzu, maitake, and astragalus. I feel I am more in touch with the smells my grandfather might have smelled, the roots and mushrooms that may have touched his fingers. Though he died young, I can imagine him (though my western educated mind) like a Vietnamese Tom Bombadil from the Hobbit, with a halo of medicinal roots around his head, gathering herbs from the forest, a long white beard, a master of medicines… a different kind of male, a healer, a caretaker, a keeper of wild herbal wisdom. Even when years of war and hardship hardened him, he still embodied some of these qualities in my mothers memory, or maybe this is just my imagination, another iteration. . . .

The Mid-Autumn Festival, which always happens during a full-moon in the fall, is the time of year when I remember the Jade Rabbit and Chang-e. The moon, like the mooncake, round with no beginning or end, simply a composite of a both-and. The Lady on the Moon and the Jade Rabbit, ever present and steady through time and ages watching. Only they know everything that ever was and ever will be, from their place high in the night sky. The rest of us are governed by our quivering memories.

Reference:

Cheng, Jennifer S. (2018). Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems. Tarpaulin Sky Press.

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